What, after all, was Heidegger about? Thomas Sheehan Stanford University

Transcription

1 1 What, after all, was Heidegger about? Thomas Sheehan Stanford University Abstract The premise is that Heidegger remained a phenomenologist from beginning to end and that phenomenology is exclusively about meaning and its source. The essay presents Heidegger s interpretation of the being (Sein) of things as their meaningful presence (Anwesen) and his tracing of such meaningful presence back to its source in the clearing, which is thrown-open or appropriated ex-sistence (das ereignete/geworfene Da-sein). The essay argues five theses: (1) Being is the meaningful presence of things to man. (2) Such meaningful presence is the Befragtes of Heidegger s question, not the Erfragtes. (3) Being and Time s goal was to articulate the openness that allows for all meaningfulness. (4) Ereignis the appropriation of exsistence to sustaining the clearing is the later Heidegger s reinscription of thrown-openness, der geworfene Entwurf. (5) Appropriated thrown-openness, as the clearing, is intrinsically hidden, i.e., unknowable. Some preliminaries: (1) I cite Heidegger s texts by page and line (the line-number follows the period) in both the Gesamtausgabe and the current English translations where available, all of which are listed in the bibliography at the end of this issue of the journal. I cite Sein und Zeit in the Niemeyer 11th edition and in the ET by Macquarrie-Robinson. (2) Sinn and Bedeutung are closely related, although Sinn is broader than Bedeutung. Sinn refers either to intelligibility as such or to the fact of something being intelligible, whereas Bedeutung is the specific meaning that a thing has. Sinn as intelligibility is generally interchangeable with Bedeutsamkeit and Verständlichkeit. Thus I translate Sinn as intelligibility or meaningfulness. Sinn in turn allows for Bedeutung as the particular meaning of a specific thing. (3) I take intellect in the broad sense of νοῦς and in the specific sense of λόγος understood as discursive intellect, whether practical or theoretical. (4) Dasein is translated as existence (= existentiel), and Existenz or Da-sein as ex-sistence (= existential). The word man refers to human being, not the male of the species. I render das Seiende as beings, things, and entities ex aequo. Man refers to human beings in general, not to the male of the species. * * *

2 What, after all, was Heidegger about? 2 Let s step back for a moment way back and ask: What was the final goal of Heidegger s thinking? What was he ultimately after? Was his goal being, das Sein? Or was it something being-er than being (wesender als das Sein)? 1 And might that be being itself, das Sein selbst, sometimes written as Seyn? Or was it rather, as Heidegger says, Seyn qua Seyn and if so, what might that mean? 2 Again: Was Heidegger s main topic die Wesung der Wahrheit des Seyns? 3 or was it die Wahrheit der Wesung des Seyns? 4 Or was his topic Anwesung, presencing? Or the Lichtung? Or Ereignis as just another name for Being Itself? Or was it, rather, Enteignis? 5 Or ἀλήϑεια? or perhaps the Λήϑη that lurks within ἀλήϑεια? 6 Or was it the ontological difference, as some scholars hold? 7 Or do all of these point to the same thing? And how exactly are we to distinguish (if we are to distinguish) one from the other? There is, in fact, considerable confusion at the heart of the Heideggerian enterprise, and it may not be the fault of Heidegger scholars. Just to stay with the term Sein: Heidegger himself said that it remains unclear what we are supposed to think under the name being. 8 Are Heideggerians, then, subject to the Master s judgment: They say is without knowing what is actually means? 9 In any case, he may have known what he meant by the word Sein, but he didn t always make that clear to the rest of us. So we might want to make our own the plea that the 1 GA 73, 2: GA 73, 2: 997: Seyn ist nicht Seyn. Further on Seyn: ibid., 968.7; ; ; ; etc.; also GA 9: 306 (g)/374 (a): Seyn ist... das Ereignis. But cf. loc. cit., Sein qua Ereignis. At GA 81: 76.18, Sein and Seyn are equated, but at GA 76: they are contrasted. 3 GA 65: = GA 65: = GA 2: 252, note a = ; GA 11: 59, note 33; GA 76: GA 6, 1: = [The difference between being and beings] is the central thought of Heideggerian philosophy : Haugland (2000, I, 47). 8 GA 40: = GA 15: =

3 Eleatic Stranger expresses in the Sophist: So first teach us this very thing lest we seem to know what you told us when in fact we don t (244a8-b1). 3 In the spirit of a medieval disputatio I propose to state and defend five theses in support of a paradigm shift in how to read Heidegger. This is an attempt to make sense of Heidegger, where I mean that phrase as a bit of a pun. I make sense of Heidegger by first of all following him in his crucial phenomenological reinterpretation of the being of beings (das Sein des Seienden) as the meaningful presence of things to man (das Anwesen des Anwesenden). Being is usually and traditionally understood as the being-ness of things: the οὐσία of τὸ ὄν, the entitas of an entity, the realness of the real. (I use the word realness in what Heidegger calls its traditional sense of existentia as objective presence: Vorhandenheit.) 10 However, Heidegger reinterprets all of that, including his own use of the being of beings, in a phenomenological mode such that being-quabeingness 11 comes out not as the ontological realness of the real but as the Anwesen of things, their presence to man. However, such Anwesen is not mere objective presence nor simply presence to our five senses 12 but rather das daseinsmäßige Anwesen the meaningful presence of things in conjunction with existence s understanding of Anwesen/Sein/meaningfulness. It follows, therefore, that the being of things is their intelligibility, their ἀλήϑεια taken broadly. See, for example, Heidegger s equation of Sein and intelligibility when he speaks of the inquiry into the intelligibility of things [Sinn des Seienden], that is, the inquiry into being [Sein]. 13 Or when he designates Sein as the intelligibility [Sinn] of phenomena. 14 Or when he speaks of ontology as the explicit theoretical question about the intelligibility [Sinn] of things. 15 However, I argue that this is only the first step. Heidegger s project finally makes sense only when we realize that his ultimate goal was the source of intelligibility, die Herkunft von 10 SZ = GA 66: = : Anwesung und d.h. Sein und d.h. Seiendheit. Also GA 74: Cf. SZ = GA 19: = SZ = SZ = This text has stood through some seventeen editions of SZ (thirteen of them during Heidegger s lifetime). But GA 2, which claims to be the unveränderter Text, changes it without notice at = to nach dem Sein des Seienden.

4 Anwesen. 16 This source he denominated as die ereignete Lichtung, 17 the appropriated or thrown-open space for possible intelligibility, which ex-sistence sustains and as such is. This clearing makes it possible for us to take Socrates as an Athenian, or this tool as suitable for that task, and thus to make sense of Socrates and the tool (traditionally, to understand their Sein ). 4 The premise of this essay is that Heidegger remained a phenomenologist from beginning to end and that phenomenology is exclusively about meaningfulness and its source. As Aron Gurwitsch pointed out years ago, once one has taken the phenomenological turn (the sine qua non of phenomenological work) there are no other philosophical problems except those of sense, meaning, and signification. 18 In short, this essay is about Heidegger s phenomenological reinterpretation of das Sein des Seienden as the significance of things, and his further tracing of such significance back to its source in appropriation. 1 Being (das Sein des Seienden) is the meaningful presence of things to man. Heidegger puts a twist on the word Sein and finally sets it aside. I no longer like to use the word Sein he said. 19 Sein remains only the provisional term. Consider that Sein was originally called presence [Anwesen] in the sense of a thing s staying-here-before-us-in-disclosedness. 20 Staying-here-before-us-in-disclosedness (her-vor-währen in die Unverborgenheit) is Heidegger s term of art for the meaningful presence of something to someone. The phrase expresses three things: (1) the relative stability and constancy of the meaningful thing (währen); 16 GA 6:2, = See GA 2: 53 note a = 37 note ; GA 10: and.28 = and.34; and GA 73, 2: GA 71: Gurwitsch (1947, p. 652). Italicized in the original. 19 GA 15: = GA 7: =

5 5 (2) the locus of its meaningful appearance, namely the world of human concerns (-vor-); and (3) a certain movement into appearance, a thing s being brought from an undisclosed but potential intelligibility into an actually operative one (in die Unverborgenheit). This disclosedness of a thing to understanding is its meaningfulness. If we overlook the phenomenological paradigm within which Heidegger works, we risk reducing his texts to some form of naïve realism in which Sein can somehow show up without human existence in the Jurassic Period, for example, some 150,000,000 years ago. It is wrong to think that Heidegger refused the phenomenological reduction and conducted his early investigations within the natural attitude. Husserl thought that to be the case and accused Heidegger of not understanding the phenomenological reduction. To be sure, Heidegger did not understand this reduction as leading things back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. 21 Rather, it meant leading the phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a thing, whatever may be the character of the apprehension, to the understanding of the being [Sein] of the thing: understanding the thing in terms of the way it is disclosed. 22 Note that this being (Sein) to which we lead a thing back is the way the thing is disclosed, that is, the way in which it is meaningfully present to us and our concerns. Heidegger s phenomenological reduction puts the breaks on (cf. epoché) our natural tendency to overlook meaning, to look through it to the entity. The reduction leads us back reflectively and thematically to where we always already stand: in relation to the thing in terms of its significance to us but not to us as some transcendental consciousness but rather as living in the world among things as a 21 GA 24: = GA 24: = , my emphasis. Cf. GA 20: = Re understanding : GA 16: = : Verstehen, d.h. Entwerfen.

6 6 body. Heidegger s phenomenological reduction is a matter of learning to stand thematically where we always already stand without noticing it. Of course neither Husserl nor Heidegger doubt that things remain independent of our thinking after the reduction. Husserl explicitly said that we must not overlook the most essential thing of all, namely that even after the purifying epoché, perception still remains perception of this house, indeed, of this house with the accepted status of actually existing. 23 And for Heidegger Questions like Does the world exist independent of my thinking? are meaningless. 24 He added that the thing in nature shows up in the reducing gaze that focuses on the act of perceiving, because this perceiving is essentially a perceiving of the thing. The thing belongs to the perceiving as its perceived. 25 For Heidegger as well as for Husserl, things are still out there after the reduction. It s just that as such they are not phenomenologically interesting. The subject matter of a phenomenological inquiry is things only insofar as we are in some way meaningfully engaged with them. After the reduction, the only philosophical problems one may properly pursue are those of intelligibility and meaning: hermeneutical questions. From the beginning that is, in his phenomenological re-reading of Aristotle in the 1920s Heidegger interpreted the Greek word οὐσία not in terms of the objective presence of things but rather in terms of their presence to human interests and concerns. An οὐσία is what belongs to a 23 Husserl (1968) = Husserl (1997) GA 58: = See GA 26: = Husserl (1968) = Husserl (1997)

7 person, one s stable possessions or holdings, something that one has a stake in. (Compare John Locke s to have a property in something. ) 26 As Heidegger later put it: 7 In Greek οὐσία means beings not just any beings but beings that are in a certain way exemplary in their being, namely the beings that belong to one, one s goods and possessions, house and home (what one owns, one s wealth), what is at one s disposal.... What makes them exemplary? Our goods and possessions are invariantly within our reach. Ever at our disposal, they are what lies close to us, they are right here, presented on a platter, they steadfastly present themselves. They are the closest to us, and as steadfastly closest, they are in a special sense at-hand, present before us, present to us. 27 Heidegger spelled out this insight by interpreting the presence of things as their meaningfulness, a theme that runs through all his work, beginning with his courses in the 1920s and continuing right through Being and Time and up to the end. [T]o live means to care. What we care for and about, what care adheres to, is equivalent to what is meaningful. Meaningfulness is a categorial determination of the world; the objects of a world worldly or world-some objects are lived inasmuch as they embody the character of meaningfulness. 28 We do not first have a dumb encounter with things and only later assign them meanings. It is not the case that objects are at first present as bare realities, as objects in some sort of natural state and that then in the course of 26 Locke (2003, p. 111). 27 GA 31: and = and GA 61: =

8 our experience they receive the garb of a value-character so that they do not have to run around naked Rather, what is primary and what is immediately given to us without some mental detour through a conceptual grasp of the thing is the meaningful [das Bedeutsame]. When we live in the first-hand world around us, everything comes at us loaded with meaning, all over the place and all the time. Everything is within the world [of meaningfulness]: the world holds forth. 30 Which means: If beings are the meaningful (das Bedeutsame), their being is their meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit). All of us, he says, whether a philosophy student, a farmer from the Black Forest, or someone from a tribe remote from Western civilization, always see what we encounter as fraught with a meaning. 31 One must put aside all theorizing and not drag in what epistemologists say about the matter. Instead, see the sense in which factical experience ever and anew has what it experiences in the character of meaningfulness. Even the most trivial thing is meaningful (even though it remains trivial nonetheless). Even what is most lacking in value is meaningful. 32 There is nowhere else for a human being to live except in meaning. 29 GA 61: = GA 56/57: = : holds forth = es weltet. 31 GA 56/57: 71:29-31 = : mit einer Bedeutung behaftet. 32 GA 58: =

9 I live factically always as a prisoner of meaningfulness. And every instance of meaningfulness has its arena of new instances of meaningfulness.... I live in the factical as in an entirely particular matrix of meaningfulnesses.... Whatever is factically experienced in factical life-contexts stands in this unobtrusive character of meaningfulness Meaningfulness, as a thing s relatedness-to-oneself (Mich-Bezogenheit) 34 need not be explicit or expressed but can remain quite implicit and unnoticed. The phenomenon of meaningfulness is not what we originally see. 35 But that in no way speaks against the reality that factical life lives in factical relations of meaningfulness. 36 Indeed: The meaning of exsistence lies, in factical life, in forms of meaningfulness, whether actually experienced, or remembered, or awaited. 37 We do not meet things by taking on board dumb sense data; we always encounter things as something or other, where, in traditional language, the as-what and the how point to the meaningful presence (Anwesen) of the thing. The as-what and the how of the encounter may be designated as meaningfulness. This itself is to be interpreted as a category of Sein. 38 Heidegger enunciates this position again in his lectures and writings of For example, his course on Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy : For a long time now, I have been designating the ontological character of existence as meaningfulness. This ontological character is the primary one in which we encounter the world GA 58: = : bedeutsamkeitsgefangen. 34 GA 58: = GA 58: = GA 58: = 84.10: in faktischen Bedeutsamkeitsbezügen. 37 GA 58: = GA 63: =

10 10 Or in reading through his essay The Concept of Time (1924; the essay meant for publication, not the Marburg address) one can hardly take a step without stumbling over the word Bedeutsamkeit. The lived world is present not as a thing or object, but as meaningfulness. 40 We have now identified the basic character of encountering the world: meaningfulness. 41 We identify meaningfulness as the world s primary ontological characteristic the primary character of encountering the world meaningfulness. 43 The following year, on the verge of writing Being and Time, Heidegger again signaled the centrality of meaning to human being in his course on logic and truth. Because the very nature of existence is to make sense of things, existence lives in meanings and can express itself in and as meanings. 44 Heidegger carried into his major work, Being and Time, this same conviction that Sein is to be understood as the meaningful presence of things. There he designated the structure of world (Welt) as meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit), and he referred to Division One s analysis of existence 39 GA 18: = GA 64: = GA 64: = GA 64: = GA 64: = GA 21: =

11 as the basis of his doctrine of meaning (Bedeutungslehre). 45 At the core of that doctrine is the phenomenology of existence as what Heidegger calls being-in-the-world. But since the essence of world is meaningfulness, we should interpret In-der-Welt-sein more accurately as In-der- Bedeutsamkeit-sein: the very structure of ex-sistence is its a priori engagement-withmeaningfulness. This is what Heidegger calls our structural familiarity with meaningfulness. 46 Absent that engagement, we cease to exist: for us there is no hors-texte, no outside-of-meaning. When we can no longer relate to the meaningfulness of things, we are dead. Our a priori engagement with intelligibility as our only way to be entails that we are ineluctably hermeneutical. We necessarily make some sense of everything we meet (even if only interrogative sense), and if we cannot make any sense at all of something, we simply cannot meet it. 11 Meaningfulness or intelligibility, which is always discursive, is confined to the realm of the human. But how exactly do things become intelligible to us? In Being and Time Heidegger writes: Intelligibility is an existentiale of existence, not a property attaching to things.... Existence alone has intelligibility. 47 But at the same time: When things within the world are discovered with the being of existence that is, when they come to be understood we say they have intelligibility. 48 That is, we alone have the ability to make sense of things, and we do so by connecting a possibility of something we encounter with a possibility or need of ourselves: we take what we meet in terms of it relation to our everyday concerns and goals. When things are discovered in such a relation with human beings within a given context, they make sense. And world is the concatenation of relations which brings that about. 45 SZ = 120.3; = 384.1; and = Cf. GA 64: = SZ = : Vertrautheit mit der Bedeutsamkeit. 47 SZ = On worldhood as an existential: ibid., = SZ = The text continues ( = ): But strictly speaking what is understood is not the intelligibility but the thing, or alternatively being. The phrase alternatively being refers to when Sein rather than das Seiende is the focus of the question, as in Heidegger s Grundfrage.

12 12 THE WORLD AS A REALM OF MEANINGFULNESS possibilities of things possibilities of things HUMAN CONCERNS AND POSSIBILITIES MEANINGFULNESS Heidegger says, As existing, existence is its world. 49 That is, the world is ourselves writ large as the matrix of intelligibility: it is our thrown-openness (Geworfenheit as geworfener Entwurf) structured as a set of meaning-giving relations. The world consists of lines of referral to our concerns (represented by the arrows above) that issue in the meaningfulness of things. We are a hermeneutical field of force, like a magnet that draws things together into unities of sense 50 insofar as these things are connected with a possibility of ourselves as the final reference point. (Heidegger is clear that the process of making sense of things is, in the broadest terms, social: Existence in itself is essentially being-with. 51 However, it must be said that his take on the social in Being and Time is generally negative: see his remarks on the crowd-self das Man-selbst in 27 and of that work.) It is quite clear, then, that by das Sein des Seienden Heidegger always means Anwesen, the meaningful presence of something to someone in terms of that person s concerns and interests. Whether early or late, Heidegger never understood such Sein as something built into things or as the objective presence of things in space and time. 52 That was what he called existentia, the ontological substance of things when they are considered apart from human involvement with them which is to say, before the enactment of a phenomenological reduction. The word Sein in Heidegger is always written under phenomenological erasure, that is, it is always understood as 49 SZ = See ibid., = 92.32; = ; = Also GA 9: = and GA 24: = Cf. GA 9: = SZ = ; see ibid., = GA 9: = : nicht eine am Stoff vorhandene, seiende Eigenschaft.

13 occurring in correlation with existence. This is not the Husserlian correlation of noema and noesis, of meant object and constituting consciousness, but rather the togetherness of Anwesen and Dasein, being-as-meaningfulness and existence. Heidegger finds this insight as far back as Parmenides dictum that being (εἶναι) and the understanding of being (νοεῖν) are inseparable (τὸ αὐτό: fragment 3). The phenomenological point is repeated by Heidegger in a variety of formulations, for example: 13 Being is given only as long as existence is (that is, only as long as an understanding of being is onticly possible). 53 Being is only in the understanding enacted by those entities whose being entails an understanding of being. 54 [The being-question] asks about being itself insofar as being enters into the intelligibility [Verständlichkeit] of existence. 55 Being: that which specifically appears only in man. 56 Being needs ex-sistence and certainly does not occur without this appropriation [of ex-sistence]. 57 Indeed, in emphasizing that being-as-meaningful-presence can appear only in conjunction with human being, Heidegger even goes so far as to speak, surprisingly, of the dependence of being on the understanding of being SZ = SZ = SZ = GA 73, 1: 337. Cf. GA 73, 2: : Sein ist nie ohne Offenbarkeit von Seiendem zu Denken. 57 GA 65: = : Seyn... Da-sein.

14 14 Being is dependent on man. 59 Being: only from ex-sistence Meaningful presence (Anwesen) is the starting point of, but not the answer to, Heidegger s Grundfrage. In what sense is Heidegger s basic question, in its traditional ontological formulation, concerned with das Sein selbst, and in what sense is it not? This question has bedeviled Heidegger scholarship from the beginning; and so we must proceed cautiously, step-by-step. Let us begin, then, by asking about the general structure of any question and then go on to apply it to the guiding question (Leitfrage) of metaphysics and the basic question (Grundfrage) of Heidegger s own work. The three moments of any question are what Heidegger calls the Befragtes, the Gefragtes, and the Erfragtes. These terms stand for, respectively, the object, the optic, and the heuristic outcome of the inquiry The Befragtes or object of a question refers to the thing under investigation, what medieval Scholasticism called the obiectum materiale quod or material object. 2. The Gefragtes or optic refers to the formal focus the inquirer adopts in investigating the material object, and the question that follows from that SZ = : Abhängigkeit des Seins... von Seinsverständnis. 59 GA 66: = 119.6: Das Seyn is vom Menschen abhängig. 60 GA 66: = : Das Seyn nur vom Da-sein. Also GA 65: = and = SZ = Also GA 88: 12: ; ; and Cf. GA 20: = : die Hinsicht; woraufhin es gesehen wird und gesehen werden soll.

15 15 3. Finally, the Erfragtes or outcome is a formal indication of the answer the inquirer hopes to obtain by bringing the formal focus to bear on the material object. With this in mind, we can distinguish metaphysics guiding question or Leitfrage from Heidegger s meta-metaphysical question or Grundfrage. Metaphysics takes things (whatever is real, whatever has being) 63 as its material object; and then asks about the being that makes them be real. In the traditional reading of Aristotle s metaphysical question (and here I focuse on its ontological moment and prescind from its theological moment) that inquiry unfolds as follows. 1. The material object that metaphysics takes up is things, whatever has being, whatever is real (τὸ ὄν). 2. The formal focus on those things is then articulated by the proviso: insofar as they have being and thus are real (ᾗ ὄν). 3. Finally, the sought-for outcome of that question is formally indicated as: whatever it is that makes things be real. Depending on the metaphysician, the content that fills out the formal indication will vary: for Plato it will be εἶδος, for Aristotle, ἐνέργεια, for Aquinas esse or actus essendi; and so on. 64 METAPHYSICS LEITFRAGE das Befragte: das Gefragte: das Erfragte: things that are real, i.e., have being What accounts for them as real? their being qua εἶδος, ἐνέργεια, esse, etc. 63 GA 22: = 5.36: Es ist, es hat Sein (Heidegger s italics). 64 At GA 22: 60.3 = metaphysics Erfragtes is formally indicated as: [Das,] was allein das Seiende selbst in seinem Sein zugänglich macht. Cf. GA 73, 2: 997.2: esse = quo est. On ἰδέα as Seiendheit: GA 94:

16 As these formulations show, the metaphysical question is focused decidedly on things, specifically from the viewpoint of why, how, and to what extent they are real. Metaphysics begins with things, then steps beyond them to discover what constitutes them as real at all: their being or being-ness in a variety of historically changing forms. But finally metaphysics returns to those things with that news. As Aristotle puts it, metaphysics announces whatever belongs to things in and of themselves and specifically their first principles and highest causes. 65 That is, the question that metaphysics puts to things is: what is their essence (their esse-ness), in the broad sense of what lets them be at all. However, the main focus is on the things. Metaphysics is clearly a matter of onto-logy insofar as the operations of questioning and answering (-logy) all bear ultimately on beings (onto-). 16 On the other hand, Heidegger s meta-metaphysical inquiry takes up where metaphysics leaves off. It takes the very being of things (whatever its historical form) and puts that under the microscope as the subject matter. What about this realness itself, this οὐσία that things have? This is the question not about ὂν ᾗ ὄν but about οὐσία ᾗ οὐσία, Sein als Sein, and specifically the question about what accounts for the fact that there is Sein at all. 66 Heidegger s question is about what grounds the inner possibility and necessity of being and its openness to us. 67 If we recall that the word being always and only refers to what makes beings be real, 68 we may state Heidegger s basic question in traditional ontological language. (Later I will express it in a more appropriate phenomenological form.) 65 Metaphysics IV 1, 1003a21-2 and GA 14: = : Sein als Sein, d.h. die Frage, inwiefern es Anwesenheit als solche geben kann. GA 15: = 96.12: Wo und wie west anwesen an? GA 65: = 62.30: Die Grundfrage: wie west das Seyn? GA 88: 9.7: Wie west das Sein? 67 GA 16: : worin gründet die innere Möglichkeit und Notwendigkeit der Offenbarkeit des Seins. 68 SZ 9.7 = 29.13: Sein ist jeweils das Sein des Seienden.

17 17 HEIDEGGER S GRUNDFRAGE IN TRADITIONAL ONTOLOGICAL TERMS das Befragte: das Gefragte: das Erfragte: the very being [of things] How is such being possible and necessary? [Let X formally indicate the sought-for outcome.] If we postpone for a moment what the heuristic X will turn out to be, I am arguing that das Sein in any and all of its incarnations is not the heuristic goal of Heidegger s question, but only its subject matter. The being [of things] is only the Befragtes, whereas the Erfragtes (which as yet remains undecided and is only formally indicated by the X ) is whatever will turn out to answer the question: What makes the very being of things possible and necessary? Consider the following analogy, which, for all its limitations, may nonetheless get us into the ballpark of Heidegger s question: Asking about the kids Asking about their mother das Befragte: the Smith children Mrs. Smith das Gefragte: How did they get here? How did she get here? das Erfragte: their mother (= Mrs. Smith) her mother (= Mrs. Jones) Metaphysics is a bit like asking the question Who are these children? and answering it by tracing the kids back to Mrs. Smith. The children are the subject matter of the question, and the inquiry reaches back behind them in the direction of the heuristic Erfragtes, which is: the mother

18 18 of these kids. This latter phrase is the formal indication of the sought-for answer, an indication that, inasmuch as it is merely formal, does not yet have concrete material content. Eventually the actual content of that formal indication will turn out to be: Mrs. Smith. Fine but the question is nonetheless geared entirely to defining the children in light of Mrs. Smith. On the other hand, Heidegger s meta-metaphysical question is a bit like starting with Mrs. Smith herself and considering her not as the mother of the little Smiths (which of course she never ceases to be, even if we bracket that out for a moment) but rather in terms of herself. Mrs. Smith herself now becomes the subject matter, and the new inquiry reaches back behind her in the direction of the heuristic Erfragtes, which is: the mother of Mrs. Smith. This phrase is merely the formal indication whose material content will turn out to be: Mrs. Jones. Heidegger s Grundfrage is a bit like Mrs. Smith s night out. It asks about Mrs. Smith seen for herself, apart from her relation to the children. And therefore the question goes behind Mrs. Smith to her source, the reason why there is a Mrs. Smith at all. And that will turn out to be Mrs. Jones. This is analogous to what Heidegger means when he says that his effort is to think Sein without regard to its being grounded in terms of Seiendes 69 to think being in and of itself. However, the intensifier itself (das Sein selbst) can be misleading. It might make one think Heidegger is after Sein in its Really Real Form, the way one might look around a cocktail party ( No, not him, nor him... ) and then say to one s partner, There! That s the host himself. This not what Heidegger intends by being itself. Here we run into a major problem that has confused Heidegger scholarship from the very beginning: the damnable fact that Heidegger uses das Sein selbst in two very distinct senses. On the one hand it refers to the Befragtes or subject matter of his question; on the other it is a heuristic device, a merely formal indicator: being itself is the heuristic X that stands in for the as-yet-unfound answer to that question. 69 GA 14: =

19 19 THE TWO MEANINGS OF DAS SEIN SELBST As the Befragtes it means: the very being [of a thing] as subject matter of the question. As the Erfragtes it is: a formal indication of whatever will answer the question. In the first case, the phrase being itself refers to what is under investigation, analogous to the way Mrs. Smith, as the Befragtes, was queried for herself and not as the mother of the little Smiths. 70 But in the second case (and with almost inevitable confusion) Heidegger more frequently uses being itself not to name the Befragtes of his question but rather as the Erfragtes, and thus as a heuristic stand-in for, a mere formal indication of, whatever it may turn to make the being of things possible and necessary. In this latter case the philosophical meaning of being itself is: das Wesen des Seins, 71 being as regards its essence, where essence refers to das Woher des Seins, the whence of being: that from which and through which being comes to pass at all. 72 This will turn out to be Ereignis, the appropriation of ex-sistence to its thrownopenness as the clearing. 73 To confuse being itself as the subject matter of Heidegger s question with being itself as a formal indication of the answer to that question is a bit like confusing Mrs. Smith with the mother of Mrs. Smith who turns out to be Mrs. Jones. You wouldn t want to confuse mother 70 Being itself has this sense at, e.g., SZ = : nach ihm [= das Sein] selbst ; at GA 40: = ; etc. 71 GA 73, 1: 108, my emphasis. GA 14: : Grundfrage nach dem Wesen und der Wahrheit des Seins. 72 GA 73, 1: : das von woher und wodurch... das Sein west. GA 94: and.19: [die] Wesung des Seins. 73 GA 73, 1: : Ereignis führt sich uns zu, in dem es uns dem Da er-eignet. Ibid., : Er-eignet uns dem Da, italicized.

20 and daughter. That would be a major category mistake... and potentially embarrassing. 20 Being in and of itself is what Heidegger is interrogating (befragen) in an effort to discover its whence, which will turn out to be the clearing that is opened up by the appropriation of ex-sistence. Appropriation yields the openness, the clearing, within which meaningful things can perdure. 74 Being itself does not indicate some higher form of Being, a Super-Sein that is different from and superior to the plain ol being-of-beings or beings-in-theirbeingness. Heidegger s goal, rather, was to think Anwesen back to its source in Ereignis ( auf das Ereignis zu... gedacht ) 75 as the indefinable it that gives the possibility of meaning at all. This move is what Heidegger calls the return from meaningful presence to Ereignis. 76 And once one gets there, Heidegger says, there is no more room even for the word Sein. 77 Without some such clarification, confusion is virtually evitable, and we can see that confusion at work when Heidegger defines his central topic as das Sein selbst in dessen Wesen being itself in its own essence. 78 This German phrase brings together both senses of being itself. The first three words refer to the Befragtes of Heidegger s question, whereas the last three words refer to the Erfragtes. 74 GA 12: = GA 14: = See GA 12: = : Dagegen läßt das Sein hinsichtlich seiner Wesensherkunft aus dem Ereignis denken. 76 GA 14:55.8 = 45.32: Rückgang vom Anwesen zum Ereignen. 77 GA 15: = : ist sogar für den Namen Sein kein Raum mehr. 78 GA 40: =

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